I wonder about the question of why the authorship question would have drawn fine legal minds? I mean, I'm wondering if they're more Make Up Pen to following where the evidence takes them?I think you're right, Renee, that the professional historians and lawyers and people are not so bound by a kind of thought set that exists in the English literature departments. And you'll find more people open-minded about this question because they're looking at the facts without a presupposition.

And they have much less to lose, reputation wise.Although, as you know well, Shakespeare scholars especially have been pretty rough. They have called you - What? - Flat-Earthers?Oh, they've told us - they've told Mark and I - they've said that we are mad, and we should be locked up in a lunatic asylum. Actually, quite - I mean, actually quite hurtfully, they say that we are anti-Shakespearean.I just have a kind of sense of injustice that we are honoring somebody who really had nothing to do with it. And I would like to place that honor where it is due.

Who cares who wrote it as long as they say it in that accent? Renee Montagne with Shakespearean actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance on the question of who wrote Shakespeare.This page earlier incorrectly called William Shakespeare the Bard of Avalon instead of the Bard of Avon.The memoir had a boom in the past couple of decades; now it's facing a backlash. Whatever happened to the "," Neil Genzlinger lamented in a recent piece in the New York Times Book Review.

It's a fair question: the genre that was once reserved for exceptional lives and exceptional writers (think presidents, prime ministers, Mary Karr and Joan Didion) now draws too many ho-hum accounts by people who don't seem to have lived much at all. But the good memoirs show can be the next best thing to experiencing another life. Here are three that sustain my faith in the genre: These books prove that memoirs can do and be anything, just as long as they're memorable